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ACORN

Life in the bubble continues undeterred for Republicans. They’re refusing to accept the truth that they lost the election for the simple reason that a majority of Americans did not accept their vision for the country. Here are the bubble numbers from the latest PPP poll:

49% of GOP voters nationally say they think that ACORN stole the election for President Obama. We found that 52% of Republicans thought that ACORN stole the 2008 election for Obama, so this is a modest decline, but perhaps smaller than might have been expected given that ACORN doesn’t exist anymore.

Damn. Despite ACORN’s best efforts to keep their existence a secret, they’ve been found out by right-wing idiots sleuths who know in their little hearts that God’s Party could never lose an election to a group that promotes hedonism and attracts the slackers and scum of society unless there was thievery involved. </snark>

Categorize the above numbers with the ones that indicate that 30 percent of Republicans still believe President Obama to be a Muslim…or the polls that show that more than half of Republicans believe that Obama was born in a foreign country.

Pathetic, but only slightly less so than this next set of numbers.

Some GOP voters are so unhappy with the outcome that they no longer care to be a part of the United States. 25% of Republicans say they would like their state to secede from the union compared to 56% who want to stay and 19% who aren’t sure.

Is it any surprise that the same PPP poll indicates that fewer Americans now identify themselves as Republicans than Democrats by a 13 point margin: 32 percent of Americans call themselves Republican compared to the 45 percent who identify themselves as Democrats.

I told myself I wasn’t going to write about James O’Keefe, mostly because his sophomoric pranks are mostly for the net effect of making his pockets fat. He has his hands out, and I’m not trying to help him get paid. I no more want to discuss voting by reference of O’Keefe than I want to write about Middle East affairs by reference of Sacha Baron Cohen in The Dictator.

But his influence on voting rights opponents and legislators alike is particularly jarring. When you hear activists and state senators say we need voter ID laws because of voter fraud, instead of citing data, or even anecdotes, lately they’ve been citing O’Keefe. When I was in Houston at the True the Vote conference I was hardly surprised when the audience erupted in applause as O’Keefe took the podium. You would’ve thought Tim Tebow entered the room. And sure enough, he presented one of his “Project Veritas” videos of himself telling unsuspecting poll workers in Minnesota that he wanted to register “Timothy Tebow” to vote before given a stack of voter registration applications.

See? There is how fraud happens, O’Keefe told the crowd. What was surprising was that no one dared to speak up that no fraud had actually happened. What was O’Keefe’s point in showing this? Yes, it’s true. Someone can fill out a registration card with a fictitious name and address. It’s also true that election officials will verify that the person on the registration card exists, and toss those that don’t. Before that happens, if the person or party handling the registration cards finds something fishy—a dubious name or sketchy address—they’ll often report it to election officials themselves if they don’t discard it, as what ACORN did, contrary to popular opinion. But no crime has been committed, and photo voter ID laws wouldn’t prevent such registration problems anyway.

But O’Keefe isn’t looking for veritas or accuracy—he just needs the perception that something fishy is going on so that he can direct you to his page and have you contribute to his fairy tale fund. That’s how hustles work. Right now, on his website he invites people to fork over the dollars because “Our work in North Carolina as draining on our staff and funds—but we produced jaw-droppiong [sic] results once again!”

Have you ever known Newt Gingrich to identify a flaw or fault with a politician, the President, the Democratic Party (etc), that he didn’t turn into the gravest, most evil transgression that humanity have ever been subjected too? When it comes to making proverbial mountains at of molehill, employing hyperbolic rhetoric to embarrass and humiliate his enemies, the-Newt, is king of the demagogues.

So if this story happened to Mitt Romney, Barack Obama or any other political enemy of the former House Speaker, how do you think he might handle it?

The BRAD BLOG is reporting that Virginia State officials have confirmed that a criminal investigation of the Gingrich for President Campaign is now underway in what investigators are describing as, massive “voter fraud.”

You may recall, that the Gingrich campaign failed to turn in enough signatures on petitions this past December, to qualify the candidate to appear on that state’s upcoming Republican primary ballot. In fact, by Gingrich’s own admission, his campaign turned in 11,100 signatures when only 10,000 were needed. The problem? 1500 of those signatures were quickly identified as fraudulent.

Of course Newt wants us to believe that this was “just a mistake” made by person his campaign had hired to collect signatures. Who was this one person who made the mistake? The campaign won’t say. Why not? Wouldn’t it be easier to scape-goat a lazy, minimum wage signature collector that let the entire campaign get black eye?

The Virginia State Attorney General’s office doesn’t view voter fraud on this scale as being “just a mistake.” In fact, an official in the Virginia State Board of Elections (SBE) described it as, “definitely an illegal act.”

Brian J. Gottestein, Director of Communication for the Office of the Attorney General confirmed to The BRAD BLOG that there is “an investigation underway.” Other than stating that fact, Gottestein refused to comment further and declined to indicate how much cooperation the AG’s office is getting from Gingrich’s Virginia campaign organization.

Only Mitt Romney and Ron Paul campaigns turned in enough signatures to be on the ballot. Surprisingly, Rick Santorum’s campaign also failed to collect enough signatures to insure that his name would be on the ballot in the southern, socially conservative state.

In the last presidential election, the grass-roots progressive organization ACORN , was put out of business when it was determined that some of the people they had hired to do voter registration, had turned in fraudulent forms.

At the time, The BRAD BLOG points out, Newt Gingrich wrote in an op-ed column that “ACORN has a long history of engaging in voter fraud.”

Really? Based on that logic, can we assume from the Virginia incident that this was not the first time the Gingrich campaign has engaged in illegal acts and voter fraud?

It will be interesting to see how the conservative media handles this scandal in light of the incessant coverage given to the “mistake” ACORN made.